BONNIE BEDELIA STRUGGLES ON AND OFF SCREEN IN `FIRE'

Bart Mills, a Los Angeles free-lance writerCHICAGO TRIBUNE

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was largely a man-made phenomenon. A few generations of misuse, a few years of drought, and the topsoil blew away. The people were left either to starve or pile into their jalopies and find new homes.

"The Fire Next Time" (airing Sunday and April 20 on CBS-Ch. 2) projects a similar scenario into the year 2030. We haven't dealt with the global-warming effect, we haven't stopped depleting the ozone layer, we haven't been careful enough with nuclear materials, and finally we suffer what an old spiritual calls "the fire next time."

Bonnie Bedelia, who stars in the four-hour production, prefers to think of "The Fire Next Time" as a family story, not science fiction. It's "The Grapes of Wrath," she says, not "War of the Worlds."

It seems that in 2030, Craig T. Nelson is a stubborn shrimper who stays in Louisiana even though the shrimp have disappeared. Bedelia explains, "He keeps his blinders on, saying, `The shrimp will come back.' But their lives get worse and worse.

"My character is a science teacher. She's a realist and she sees the whole thing coming. We can't drink the water and we're up to our ears in garbage. She finally splits on her husband because she wants a better life for her three children."

Like the Joads in "The Grapes of Wrath," the family embarks on a chancy journey toward the promise of a better life-not out West, but up North. The country they traverse is scourged by strange weather, shriveled by famine and beset by demagogues and strongmen.

"It's an epic survival struggle," Bedelia says. "Making it was a struggle in itself. We worked 18-hour days in swamps with crocodiles floating by. I watched a boa strangle a catfish and got splashed. In such circumstances, half the time you don't have a mind. You operate on mooshbrain."

TV usually types Bedelia as a wife and mother, though she sees herself more in the femme fatale range. "I've broken up a lot of marriages," she claims.

In her prime at 45, mother of two teenagers, she has spent her career being more beautiful than she needed to be. Instead of displays of romantic passion, her roles have usually called for wifely or motherly grit and gumption.

Born and raised in a working-class neighborhood on Manhattan's East Side, Bedelia was a child star in the 1950s and a young leading lady in the theater in the '60s. She appeared on Broadway a half-dozen times, danced for the New York City Ballet and worked on the soap "Love of Life" for five years.

Her defining role was as Bruce Dern's pregnant wife in "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" (1969). In her most widely seen movies, the two "Die Hard" pictures and "Presumed Innocent," she played wives.

After completing her make-believe trek to Canada in "The Fire Next Time," she went to Canada for real, starring in a film of Stephen King's "Needful Things," to be released in August.

Encountered on the set of "Needful Things" on an island off Vancouver, Bedelia is one antsy actress. "I can't even get in trouble here," she complains about the isolated location.

Tonight's scene involves some derring-do by leading man Ed Harris, playing the town sheriff. "I'm so jealous," says Bedelia, just here to watch. "He's got a badge, he's got a gun, he's got a truck, he punches people. Guys get to do all the fun stuff."